Thursday’s editorial calls for a bit
more opposition in local elections, for the benefit of everybody:
Surprise! Republican Mark Lazarus is
your new Horry County Council Chairman.
Well, not much of a surprise. In
fact, this was about as far from a surprise as is possible. If surprise were a
city, we’d still be right here and those actually in Surprise would be halfway
across the world, somewhere in Eastern Europe.
If surprise were measured on a scale of 1 to 100, we’re around a -6. That’s how
far from surprised we were with the outcome of Tuesday’s election.
How unexciting and predictable was
this race? Only a paltry 1.23 percent of Horry County
voters bothered to turn out on Tuesday. The unfortunate poll workers at the
Gurley precinct in Loris waited all day and nobody showed up to vote. Hopefully
they had a good book.
Friday’s editorial isn’t so
much a stance on an issue as just an observation about how the faces of our
leadership seem to stay the same from year to year:
It’s been quite a year of change for Horry County
leadership. Or has it? What’s striking is how little things might have actually
changed.
To quickly sum up the most notable
moves among our top brass:
Sunday’s editorial offers the
editorial board’s thoughts on the presidential election:
Few things about this presidential
election have lent themselves to unambiguous, clear decisions, despite what the
campaigns and their diehard supporters might like us to believe. Neither of the
major candidates is a miraculous savior or unmitigated fiend. Both stand before
U.S.
voters with significant high and low points, and nobody has managed to leap to
the fore as the obviously better choice.
For proof, you need look no further
than the latest polling data. We give our fellow Americans credit for being
fairly smart and invested in the future of this nation, and as such, if the
decision on picking our next leader were an easy one, we wouldn’t be coming
down to the wire with two candidates that are still neck and neck.
Thursday’s editorial suggests we all
take a deep breath and tone down the fever-pitched rhetoric that’s been flying
ahead of November’s election.
How about a quick game? We looked
back in our archives and the archives of other newspapers. The quotes by voters
below were printed before the presidential elections of 1876, 1896, 1916, 1932,
1980, 1996, 2000 and 2008. Can you match them to the year they came from?
(Answers at the bottom of the editorial)
1. “This is the most important
election of the last 50 years or 50 years to come.”
2. “This is the most important
election in at least half a century.”
Sunday’s second editorial is a quick
defense of the chamber’s recent sand sculpture at the DNC:
While we’re speaking of the Myrtle
Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, the group has taken some unfair flak recently
for its sand sculpture of President Obama, erected in Charlotte early this month during the
Democratic National Convention. Letters to the editor and online commenters
have taken the chamber to task for what they see as both a waste of money and
political bias.
Does the governor need to be in her
office all day every day in order for the state to run? Of course not.
S.C. Democrats took to the offensive
this week, complaining that the governor has been off on a two week vacation at
political conventions in Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C., rather than at the Statehouse in Columbia.
So the governor’s rollout of an
ethics reform platform was somewhat bungled. That doesn’t mean her ideas are bad,
as today’s editorial explains:
Yesterday we used this space to
castigate Gov. Nikki Haley for her childish snubbing of a reporter attempting
to do her job during the governor’s statewide tour promoting ethics reform. But
it’s important to note that while we may not agree with all of the governor’s
methods, the specific proposals she offered are worthy of support, and it would
be a shame to let these good ideas be overshadowed by poor choices made in the
process of promoting them.
Editorial No. 2, in which we take the state Democratic Party to task for their silly post-election lawsuits (which keep coming):
It’s one thing to make an unpopular stand on a contentious issue because it violates deeply held principles and you truly don’t agree with it. It’s another matter entirely when that stand is only a way of furthering your own position.
That’s at least the way the state’s Democratic Party is looking as it persists in its lawsuits against Republican winners of June’s primaries.
Today, our thoughts on the Democratic side of the congressional race:
If Preston Brittain is trying to cast himself as the “new generation” of politics, he’s doing a pretty good job of looking like the old generation.
Brittain, the presumptive Democratic front-runner in the 7th Congressional District race – at least since Rep. Ted Vick’s campaign imploded last month – has racked up an impressive stack of endorsements. Congressmen, state leaders and local Democratic movers and shakers have all lined up behind him. Perhaps they know something we don’t, but we just can’t bring ourselves to do the same.
After interviewing three of the four candidates remaining in the race – Harry Pavilack did not respond to requests for an interview – The Sun News was most impressed with the candidacy of CCU professor Gloria Bromell Tinubu.
The political atom bomb dropped by the state Supreme Court this week has ousted 17 would-be candidates from Horry County ballots and cleared the way for a slate of incumbents to be re-elected. The decision on filing violations has caused chaos throughout the state, led to name calling in the state Senate and will be the subject of House and Senate resolutions on Tuesday to help put those candidates back on the ballot.
Party leaders are scrambling to determine what the fallout will mean in dozens of elections, and many candidates now must decide whether to drop out or run as petition candidates, which could complicate the ballot for voters in November.
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